This lesson guides you through the design and development of a game called Meteor Defense that is loosely based upon the classic Missile Command
arcade game. Along with demonstrating a variety of different game programming techniques, the Meteor Defense game shows how to take advantage of animated backgrounds and explosion sprites.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

This hour guides you through the design and development of another complete
game. You've spent the past couple of hours learning how to animate the
appearance of sprites and spruce up the background of games, and it's now
time to put this knowledge to work in an entirely new game. The game is called
Meteor Defense, and it is loosely based on the classic Missile Command arcade
game. Seeing as how there have been several news reports in the past few years
about the potential of a significant meteor collision with the Earth, I thought
it might make a neat premise for a game. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad
idea to have a missile-based system for stopping incoming meteors, which is the
premise behind the game Meteor Defense.

In this hour, you'll learn:

About the conceptual overview of the Meteor Defense game

How to design the Meteor Defense game

How to add a few new sprite features to the game engine

What it takes to build the Meteor Defense game

How much fun it can be testing a new game

How Does the Game Play?

One of the classic arcade games that many people remember is Missile Command,
which involves the defense of a group of cities against a nuclear attack. The
nuclear attack involves missiles that travel down from the top of the screen
toward the cities at the bottom. Your job is to fire upon the missiles and
destroy them before they reach the cities. Although Missile Command made for an
interesting game in the era of the hit movie War Games, the threat of
nuclear attack is somewhat diminished these days, at least in terms of what most
of us perceive as a realistic threat. However, there has been increasing talk in
the past few years of the possibility of a meteor striking the Earth and causing
major damage.

The premise of the game you develop in this hour is similar to Missile
Command in that you're defending helpless cities against an incoming
threat. In this case, however, the threat is giant meteors, not nuclear
warheads. The Meteor Defense game employs a game play strategy similar to
Missile Command in that you fire missiles at the incoming meteors to stop them
from destroying the cities below. As you'll find out, the critical skill to
becoming a good player at Meteor Defense (and Missile Command as well) is
learning how to target a meteor and give a missile time to get there. In other
words, you often have to lead a meteor by a certain distance to give the missile
time to get there and make contact.

The object of Meteor Defense is to simply protect the cities against the
incoming meteors for as long as possible. One interesting aspect of the game is
that you lose points whenever you fire a missile, which makes it important to be
efficient when you fire on the meteors. In other words, if you unleash missiles
indiscriminately, you will no doubt protect the cities but your score will
suffer. This is a subtle way to discourage sloppy game play. Small touches like
this can often make a game much more appealing to serious game players.